Next to be cloned: woolly mammoth

I’m just going to laugh if they end up generating a regular elephant – we have no real evidence which states woolly mammoths had fur.

The long extinct woolly mammoth could be resurrected in under four years, thanks to cloning technology breakthrough. Previous efforts in the 1990’s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue of mammoths found in Siberia failed because the region’s extreme cold had damaged them.

According to scientists, woolly mammoths became extinct about 10,000 BC when a comet exploded in the earth’s atmosphere and caused fires.

Dr. Akira Iritani of Kyoto University in Japan plans to insert the nuclei of mammoth cells into a modern elephant’s egg cell, creating a woolly mammoth embryo that will be brought to term by an elephant mother. The elephant was chosen because it is the nearest modern relative to the mammoth. “If a cloned embryo can be created, we need to discuss, before transplanting it into the womb, how to breed (the mammoth) and whether to display it to the public,” Iritani said. ”After the mammoth is born, we will examine its ecology and genes to study why the species became extinct and other factors.”